The case for simplicity

By Stanley M. Aronson

To write simply, said Somerset Maugham, is as difficult as to be good. And therefore simplicity in writing is not a task to be left for the ambitious nor a chore relegated to a random Sunday afternoon.

Writers of newspaper columns ― simple peasants ― often embroider their texts with blizzards of adjectives, achieving substantive padding rather than adding critical substance to their frail message.

Words, especially those elegant, polysyllabic ones, often serve to obscure rather than illuminate their intended message. Ask a writer to address the subject of simplicity, and what follows might be an encyclopedic slagheap of words.

Consider an apocryphal story about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson while on a camping trip in Britain's Cornwall. It is late autumn, a time when meteorites are plentiful and the air is clear and cool. After a generous meal of pheasant supplemented by a choice bottle of Madeira wine, Watson and Holmes enter their tent and go to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes awakens and asks Watson: "My friend, what do you see?" And Watson replies: "Holmes, I see countless stars, the moon is a waning crescent in the west and the sundry cosmic constellations are in a configuration denoting that Sagittarius is in astrological ascendancy. And what do you see, Holmes?" Holmes replies: "Watson, you simpleton, I see that our tent has been stolen!"

While Holmes may be correct in identifying the most urgent of those situations visible to the unaided eye, he is wrong to call his friend a simpleton. A simpleton would have immediately detected the theft of the tent and left the zodiac esoterica for another time or place. Simplicity, while never diminishing its intended message, seeks less than more.

The great English actor Peter Sellers (1925-1980) starred in the 1979 film "Being There." Directed by Hal Ashby, it tells the story of a childlike adult whose simple demeanor and enigmatic head-nods are interpreted by sundry elder statesmen and titans of global finance as indications of profound, sage wisdom and superior comprehension of the complexities of the world of commerce.

Sellers' character is thus embraced as a child of God endowed with vast knowledge, at least according to those who are utterly bewildered by the brevity, the simplicity, of his responses. Perhaps, to a cynical moviegoer, the character remains an innocent, a simpleton, solely because he had not yet discovered the intricacies of his subconscious world.

At the conclusion of the film, the character, still uncontaminated by the complexities of this world, literally walks on water as he departs from a life more depraved than he might possibly tolerate. "The sun shineth on the dunghill and is not corrupted," wrote John Lyly (1554-1606).

The world has long since relegated innocence to the trash heap of cognitive failure. Civilization treats it as little more than suspicious behavior, a prelude to dementia. Innocence, like simplicity, is said to flourish only in childhood nurseries, Sunday-school catechisms, asylums for the mentally challenged and G-rated films; and in any other situation it is viewed, through shaded eyes, as a charlatan's disguise.

Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), also known as Mark Twain, who wrote a book about innocents abroad, urged the merit of plain, simple language over heavily perfumed, overly rouged text.

In talking of his beloved Mississippi, he wrote: "Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me when I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!"

When we intricate humans seek tranquility, we turn instinctively, knowingly, to nature rather than to our own complex contrivances. And when nature responds, she answers in the most simple of ways.

Stanley M. Aronson is dean of medicine emeritus, Brown University. He is also a columnist for the Providence Journal. Contact him at smamd@cox.net.